KOIVUKOSKI
Political Theory • Philosophy
In this unique, enlightening monograph, Toivo Koivukoski explores the circums...
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KOIVUKOSKI
Political Theory • Philosophy
In this unique, enlightening monograph, Toivo Koivukoski explores the circumstances that have led modern society to use the concept of progress as a surrogate cosmology that gives individuals a sense of place and purpose. By linking various historical paradigms from German Idealist philosophy to contemporary philosophies of technology, this work of political theory describes an alternative, immanent pattern of development that is, in a sense, driven by its own unintended consequences. The meditations outlined within this book map out the hypertext pathways of our global system, making its constitutive relations and underlying thought processes transparent. Koivukoski mirrors the new hyper-realities of electronic communications technologies by structuring the text in compact subchapters that are linked through an index of subjects that allows readers to “find their own philosophy” by jumping to areas of interest. If, as he argues, history understood in a linear, lockstep fashion is over, then the ways of developing concepts should change respectively so that the sorts of retrievals, anticipations, loops, and leaps that characterize nonlinear, networked thinking are consciously realized in an identity of form and substance. TOIVO KOIVUKOSKI is assistant professor of political science at Nipissing University in Ontario, Canada.
For orders and information please contact the publisher Lexington Books A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 Lanham, Maryland 20706 1-800-462-6420 www.lexingtonbooks.com
AfterLastManPODLITH.indd 1
ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-1874-0 ISBN-10: 0-7391-1874-9
AFTER THE LAST MAN
“This book is both profound and important. The text is a self-generating dance of relations, a shimmering reflection of its subject: our technology and ourselves. Its greatest strength is clear-eyed courage and clear expression. The result is an array of brilliant insights that often take the reader by surprise, forcing him to turn around, catch his breath, and think.” —Tom Darby, Carleton University
AFTER THE LAST MAN Excurses to the Limits of the Technological System
TOIVO KOIVUKOSKI
8/15/08 3:27:06 PM
After the Last Man
After the Last Man Excurses to the Limits of the Technological System
Toivo Koivukoski
LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.
Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK
LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 Lanham, MD 20706 Estover Road Plymouth PL6 7PY United Kingdom Copyright © 2008 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Koivukoski, Toivo. After the last man : excurses to the limits of the technological system / Toivo Koivukoski. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-1874-0 (hbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-7391-1874-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Technology—Philosophy. 2. Technology—Social aspects. 3. Technology and civilization. 4. Civilization, Modern—21st century—Philosophy. I. Title. T14.K64 2008 601—dc22 2008021803 eISBN-13: 978-0-7391-3017-9 eISBN-10: 0-7391-3017-X Printed in the United States of America
⬁ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Thanks to my teachers and students, who came before and after and so put me in my place, and to Lieann, who rescues me again and again.
“In the beginning there was no Beginning, and in the end, no End.” —Christopher Logue, War Music
“. . . he tells his readers that they had better find for themselves the end of the story.” —Hannah Arendt, “No Longer and Not Yet,” Essays on Understanding
Contents
By Way of an Introduction
xi
Section 1:
1
Thinking Technology to its Ends
the fragility of technology
1
life inside the technological system
2
like water to fish
7
platitude #1:
8
interstice
9
watching war
10
a global event
11
system logic
13
Angelus Novus
20
apo-stasis
23
shadows on the wall
26
historical materialism unplugged
26
multitasking our minds
28
vii
viii
Section 2:
Contents
From a Posthistorical Worldview
35
trans-humus
35
transhumant
39
on a second-hand greeting: “Welcome to the Desert of the Real”
39
history is an act that went walking
43
platitude #2: <everyone has technology>
45
the hopeful science
46
on the post-modern architecture of the mind
50
the relief of the human condition
52
black-box
57
on a word: “technology”
59
language lost
64
the hyper-reality of fish
66
sign language
69
closed circuit love
70
being on tv
71
self as phantasmagoria
72
clarification
75
Section 3:
Experiments in Posthumanism
81
on being human
81
savage machines
82
on being real
84
configurations of reality
85
what is the real?
86
the habit of transcendence
89
naked thought
90
world on edge
92
a new orbit
93
Contents
Section 4:
Technological Imperium and its Limits
another side of the dialectic
ix
95 95
after the last man
101
inside the spectacle
102
the state as mechanical man
105
a prosthetic body politic
106
world on automatic
108
killing for reality
109
surrealism and the American geopolitical imagination
111
the enemy as imperial excess
112
the imperial perspective
113
Index
117
About the Author
121
By Way of an Introduction
No sooner were all things separated in this way, and confined within definite limits, than the stars which had long been buried in darkness and obscurity began to blaze forth all through the sky. So that every region should have its appropriate inhabitants, stars and divine forms occupied the heavens, the water afforded a home to the gleaming fishes, earth harboured wild beasts, and the yielding air welcomed the birds. There was as yet no animal which was more akin to the gods than these, none more capable of intelligence, none that could be master over all the rest. It was at this point that man was born: either the Creator, who was responsible for this better world, made him from divine seed, or else Prometheus, son of Iapetus, took the new-made earth which, only recently separated from the lofty aether, still retained some elements related to those of heaven and, mixing it with rainwater, fashioned it into the image of the all-governing gods. Whereas other animals hang their heads and look at the ground, he made man stand erect, bidding him look up to heaven, and lift his head to the stars. So the earth, which had been rough and formless, was molded into the shape of man, a creature till then unknown. —Metamorphoses, Ovid.1
For the last two and a half thousand years since Plato’s attack on the myths of Homer a split between dialectical and mythical modes of thought has truncated human experience into the operations of logos—a “true and exact reason” or the defining word—distinguished from what Plato called a kind of “spurious reason”—muthos—that pertains to the unifying field of possibilities within which local events occur.2 Through the working out of this ontological and epistemological division those mythic narratives, folk wisdoms and intuitions of the whole associated with oral traditions and mythopoetic thinking have xi
xii
By Way of an Introduction
been consistently suppressed as part of a historical process of the progressive rationalization of beings. However, that persistently lopsided ratio of human faculties is shifting, with a resurgence of mythic attitudes—what are cosmogonies really, as in <We live in a new world now>—arising both as reactionary responses of auto-rejection against technological integration, and as positivefeedback mechanisms of conservative genuflection that serve to essentialize the status quo. Yet whatever its tenor of expression, this confluence of the hyperrational and the mythic bears fundamental consequences for our sense of self and for the world of meanings we make for ourselves. As the long enduring hierarchy of logos over mythos is flattened out, mythic sensibilities are recovered on a new structural basis, with myths no longer tied to the natural human power of speech and to the system of interrelated processes that constitute the natural world (what is the forgotten soil of myth). What we have rather is a new field of potential meanings that stretch the limits of inherited reason because they are arising out of an entirely new phenomenon: a man-made cosmos constituted by global systems of exchange and communication. Here the manifold of potential relations retrieves the significant sense that all worldly things and events are systemically interconnected in a way that recalls the primordial compactness of ancient mythic worldviews, within which local events may be interpreted for their cosmological significances. A merger of postmodern and prehistorical perspectives thus raises fundamental structural questions for any dialectical consideration of causality, since within such an integrated world-system for every one consequence there are ten thousand potential causes. To make a coherent narrative out of such a field of potential meanings, or even to begin naming and numbering its parts for that matter would require an altered mode of expression—a new language form structured via patterns of nodes or episodes, in which each story acts as a discrete field of meaning and microcosmos situated within a complex skein of events, which are themselves other stories, referring to other stories, and so on to other stories. Here the question of fundamental ontology—What is the being of beings?—takes on a narrative twist, as in the First Nations’ myth that has the world resting on the back of a turtle, and beneath that, on turtles all the way down. We witness a similar pattern of the passing off of substance in the second possible scenario in Ovid’s cosmogony—creation originating from an earthly, human source— where the creator of man is “Prometheus, son of Iapetus,” and is thereby ontologically enmeshed in a biological cycle of begetting that begets begetting. Between symbolism and fundamental ontology, what is significant in terms of expressible meanings is that within a mythic system—whether nature-based or technological—another layer of references is always possible. It is the linkages themselves that are beings’ basis for being. On the one hand, each node within a network is a microcosm and system of relations
By Way of an Introduction
xiii
existing as a distinct moment of expression, yet at the same time each individuated node within the system leaves openings for other threads of meaning to be filled in, with each link acting as a fold in a self-contained cosmos, opening up inward into other worlds of meaning within the same technological system. The wonder of being in relation to beings is at the origins of both mythic and philosophic thinking, with the distinction made at those junctures at which philosophy breaks off and pauses, and where the mythmaker would simply carry on to the next story. At such moments of undetermined relations there is a special kind of closeness between reflection and being, with the undetermined subject both reflecting on the world and reflecting itself back onto the world. To reflect is to turn around, step back, and witness where one was, and in so doing change where the self stands, such that the reflecting subject is opened up in a reciprocal exchange with the subject of reflection. For given the situation of any form of reflective activity or expression in the perspectival descriptions, judgments, and worldviews that make recollection and writing possible to begin with, truth in reflection supersedes accuracy in representation of an objective reality “out there” in the world. That long prevailing model of truth as correspondence has, in effect if not in essence, apparently been reduced to a technical problem solvable by digital technologies with their infinitely reproducible, bifurcated truths. In light of the exhaustion through application of a correspondence model of reality in the technical reproduction of a homogenized world of objectivities, truth in reflection should be considered rather as a mode of direct participation in the phenomenon that is thought, through which the subject of reflection looks back at the reflecting subject. In this sense, even to simply perceive another being—or oneself, for that matter— is to have one’s perspective altered by the experience. This particular text is a sign of what it describes—technology—in that it is a reflection on and of the networked digital communications technologies that presently encompass the globe. In the absence of a linear order with a prescribed beginning or a given end, here nodes of text are clustered thematically, with links to other related passages suggesting situational narratives. These links act as a kind of running index, collecting like subjects at the margins for cross-referencing, rather than burying lists of categories and subcategories at the back of the book, safely ordered and out of sight. Here the idea of likeness—between a particular being and the category predicated to it, or between referents and their symbolizations—operates substantively in communicative linkages that mirror a hypertext structure. Through such symbolic exchanges, the word “like” takes on paired grammatical and ontological functions, serving as a link between local fields of meaning rather than postulating a singular correspondence between various examples standing in as imperfect representations of monolithic archetypes. In this sense
xiv
By Way of an Introduction
the category is made to serve the various multiplicities between which thinking makes associations. This ontological pattern of “being in relation to . . .” has a basis in common sense, which in this instance would have one consult an index not for the purpose of the category in and of itself, but rather to find the particular entries that are collected within it, thinking outward from provisional singularities—ideas—that act as conceptual hubs joining networks of concrete particulars. Even these particulars—sections, pages, paragraphs, sentences, words, letters, pixels, data—can be considered as hubs within local networks of meaning, or at the level of operational language, as lines of code within which the life and power of the executable phrase spring from crossreferences to other phrases—. Here the characteristic ifthen form of propositional logic is liberated from the loops and end phrases that the dumb function of computers reduces to via the intertextual structure of the network within which the code operates—a structure that effectively disperses compact formulations from which manifold connections and multiple endings can be drawn. As such, and as in the world after the end of history, causality is indeterminate and has tangential trajectories, context is local, and a detached Archimedean perspective is replaced by a sense of involvement in, responsibility for, and wonder at a world of our own making. We inhabit a world of integrated contradictions, of broadband empires and wireless tribes in which the rational is co-penetrated with the mythic: a hyperrationalized global technological system that provokes its own autorejections from within a world managed for transparency of resources and efficiency in their exchanges. In light of an ending of the modern age defined by a faith in progress there is a need for a way of thinking capable of finding meaning within an integrated world, something deeper and more purposive than a technical manual concerned with network maintenance, but at the same time more rational than the mythic grand narratives that are having their renaissance. Yet given the dominant form of knowledge in technical expertise and the hollowing out of public discourse into corporate mass media the present rebirth of mythic sensibilities is understandable. As citizens become estranged from the apparatuses of technocratic decisionmaking and as technology itself becomes increasingly efficient and invisible in its ongoing operations those systems of human artifacts upon which public order and private satisfactions depend start to seem more and more magical in their operations. And with the new superstition that has technology operating on automatic comes a heightened sense of fatalism, which is itself a cultural product of a hyperrationalized world shading into mythic modes and orders. After centuries of its suppression, the new efforts at mythmaking consist largely of predictably clumsy recyclings of the crudest mythic trope of an original war of order versus chaos. It is as if our cultural capacities for articulating
By Way of an Introduction
xv
the dimensions and divisions of our new world are themselves thrown back into the primordial undifferentiated—back to what many of human history’s founding stories identify as the origin of all things. Under such conditions, insensitivity to myth in its full dimensions too easily translates into its unconscious determination. In the present confluence of ongoing rationalization and the episodic resurgences of myth, the deterministic attitudes that presently predominate in global politics thus arise as one possible consequence of life within an interconnected web of processes and events. For within such a bifurcated framework of apparently irreconcilable perspectives, and according to the new dogmas (common to every new world born out of crisis) the mythic conceptualization of human affairs on a global scale as a cosmogonic conflict between the System and its detractors—though nonetheless based upon the (correct) intuition of the integrated operation of events— has critical discourses shading into conspiracy theories while the dominant discourse converts all alternative expressions into conspiracies by default. Though this is not to say that the new prominence of mythical thinking is entirely retrograde. Myth possesses an entrancing sense of speaking directly to the being of beings through an attunement to the world conceived as a discursive web of relations. In myth the word is the foundation for reality, in the senses both of making the world humanly intelligible and, somewhat more magically, in terms of the reconstitution of worldviews through the periodic retelling of cosmogonic stories. Within myth whoever tells and retells the stories of how a new world first came into being, what were its origins and into what elements it was divided, acts thus to give shape, substance and overarching thematics to the world they describe. Clearly this is a kind of attributed meaning that is prone to slippages in interpretation. This sense of meaning in myth that is both totalizing and yet at the same time open to interpretation speaks to one original sense of the Greek muthos as Homer uses it, to mean simply a story—and a true one at that—told in its completeness.3 Or on an alternate scale of expression, in some other instances muthos can be translated simply as a word, conceived as the basis of possibility for making the world intelligible, as in ‘to put it into words.’ A word in the sense of muthos can be spoken—as in the first use of muthos in the Iliad to describe Agamemnon’s “forceful words,” which considering the warlord who speaks them are hardly insubstantial. “He made a threat (muthos) and already it is accomplished”.4 Or alternatively muthos can mean the words that one thinks without speaking, like the silent though substantial muthos of Zeus—what could be interpreted as a secret plan bound together within a web of complex sympathies between humans and gods. From translation to translation these dimensions of myth as constitutive discourse describe an arc of possible interpretations from homeopathic magic intended to manipulate change in the world to the quiet interiority of language conceived as intention. At the root of all of these original senses of myth is the assumed substantiality of the mythic discourses themselves, considered within their specific cosmologies. The stories that en-
xvi
By Way of an Introduction
frame the mythic worldview also constitute the worlds they call into being, in that the stories act as microcosms of the world at large—first as spoken wor(l)ds, and now in the novel form of digital wor(l)ds. To reflect on such a system of signs requires a form of expression capable of both participating in the constitutive operations of mythic language, with their programmatic, repetitive structures and episodic compactness, while also representing the unfolding quality of dialectical discourse—that is its differentiated ongoing-ness—wherein each successive idea follows from the last like stepping-stones guiding the reader from one idea to the next as a text points out toward symbolically anticipated meanings. Such a projection of meaning via symbolism is perhaps the distinctive feature of purely dialectical discourses, which can never really get to the immediate essence of the things themselves, but rather send out strings of representations of meaning, some as objectifying discourses, some as commands, some as hopes and prayers, projected from the self as subject onto a silent world of dispirited beings. It is as this dialectical mode of representation reaches its epistemological limits that the potentials of a new mythic sensibility are made known by a series of reversals of expectations. If the truth-code of modernity in the end reduces to the verum factum—the truth that we have made—then what is knocking against that shell of a truth from within are the unintended products of human creativity. In our age of the global event and as a governing public faith in progress wanes, replaced by the collective apprehension of immanent, recurring, systemic crises, history is liberated of determinate teleologies and is manifest as a self-augmenting, open-ended process of change that is moved from within, alternating between the mutually affirming potentials of integration and fragmentation. What ghost of reason remains in history functions not as an end goal but rather as a servo-mechanism to monitor the iterant exchanges between these alternating threats and potentials. How then to understand history without being able to perceive a rational end or a purpose to the unfolding of historical potentials? The question bears on how can one make sense of the place of human beings within the whole if not as historical beings situated within the context of historical progress, overcoming human-made and naturally given obstacles toward the realization of freedom. This story of development has thus far served as modernity’s surrogate narrative for a cosmological order of things. At least since the systematic articulation of Hegel’s universal history, the universal recognition of human beings as essentially free and equal beings has stood in as ideological justification of human purpose in the world generally considered. This idea of progress in history served as the overarching theoretical order of things in late-modernity, and it is this unifying idea that is presently under siege, as the modern principles of freedom and equality undergo a global crisis in which the self that is the locus of these progressive ideals ex-
By Way of an Introduction
xvii
plodes into a web of signifiers in transit and of fractured identities. Yet the same ethical crisis that may be considered, on the one hand, as an opening for a posthistorical conception of the self held together by mutual dependencies within an integrated digital environment may alternatively tear humanity apart in the drive toward the domination of time as history. For there are at least two ways of interpreting a crisis, either as the freeing of those determinations that enframe our daily lives and social order, or alternatively, the crisis mentality may register as a programmed echo of historical consciousness experienced as fate, broadcasting the insistence of wars and revolutions as necessities into an otherwise unknown future. In terms of how a reflexive consciousness of the world is constituted and structured, one could refer to technology, or one could talk in terms of media, that is in terms of the means of communications and the corporate and consensual networks that systematize those means, but then analysis starts on the way to either commentary on shadows on the wall or, more critically perhaps, to questioning the corporations that mediate the mediations. However neither strategy of interrogation is capable of breaking through the closed circuit of symbolic exchanges that constitute the global technological system, but only in asking: <What are the conditions that must pertain in order for us to be able to see the world as we do? > can we come into a free relationship with the world we make, witness, and inhabit. This is not to fetishize technology, but rather to consciously engage with the fundamental conditions of possibility that set the shape of our world and in so doing both enframe and instigate the sources of disorder in our psyches and our global politics. For social constructivism, goto “a global event,” page 11. For liberation, goto “the enemy as imperial excess,” page 112. For an Archimedian view, goto “the imperial perspective,” page 113.
NOTES 1. Ovid, Metamorphoses, translated by Mary Innes (London: Penguin, 1955) 1.70–90. 2. Timaeus, 52b. Plato’s substitution of logos for mythos as the “true word” rests upon an ontology that privileges eidetic stability over worldly flux. The Platonic logos functions as a symbolic representation of archetypal ideas, the outward forms of which gather together the enduring remains of phenomena in a scavenger-like dismembering and dispatching of the living language of myth. For an elaboration on the dividing and stabilizing functions of logos, see Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, Macquarrie and Robinson (trans.) (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1962) 32–34. 3. Odyssey. 12.450. 4. Iliad. 1.388 (my translation)
1 Thinking Technology to its Ends
“I shall lay before your eyes the works of men involving corporeal things. After causing you to wonder at the most powerful machines, the most unusual automatons, the most impressive illusions and the most subtle tricks that human ingenuity can devise, I shall reveal to you the secrets behind them, which are so simple and straightforward that you will no longer have reason to wonder at anything made by the hands of men.” —Eudoxus speaking in The Search for Truth, René Descartes
THE FRAGILITY OF TECHNOLOGY The world in which we do our human business1 is held together by a technological system composed of mutually interdependent military, political, economic and cultural communications networks that are increasingly and apparently fragile. We saw this from a macro perspective when the electricity supply system collapsed in eastern North America, for example. Such crises heighten an emerging sense of awareness of the mutual interdependencies that constitute the global technological system, but prosthetic memories are short by design and the blast of media coverage that was heard during that event has gone silent, the problem handed off to technical experts on its way to being forgotten while attention shifts from one crisis to the next: <What was the problem there? a surge in demand and a scarce supply of electricity? a mid-summer heat wave? a downed electrical line? a wind storm? a lightning bolt? a chain reaction within a sub-continental network. . .>
1
2
Section 1
This basic intuition that the technological system is fragile is experienced in daily life, and global society in turn articulates that common sense in ever more pervasive and widely broadcast fears of the end of the world. The global community has been living on edge since the first truly global event that was S.11, with its various interpretations and consequences. However, the true danger to be witnessed in the present crisis, as in any, is in the outlook as much as in the event itself, where the terror of the spectacle functions as a self-fulfilling prophecy to escalate millenarian attitudes into militant religious zealotry, making fears come true in the form of a man-made, real-time televised hell on earth. Yet the reality that is at issue for those who wish to remain aware, involved and at home in the world is not an immanent end of the world, but rather a crisis in our own understandings: that is, the end of the world as we knew it. Neither a gnostic flight from worldly life nor violent reactions to ratchet up the imposition of a technological order can bring us closer to this reality in understanding. Rather, the idealist and realist attitudes here act reciprocally to confirm and instigate one another in an impasse of traditional categories of division giving substance to their own antitheses, with brute control refused by ideals in the abstract extreme and visa versa. What hope remains within this cyclical exchange of provocations pushed to the limits of self-annihilation is that it should offer the most insistent provocation: toward a serious consideration of a collective dependence on technology as our enframing and mutually sustaining environment. After all, the technological system is not an abstraction, but our defining reality in the sense that it makes our shared lives—that is our public, cultural, and political lives—possible. Our economies depend on electronic exchanges, both on the macro scale of global finance, as well as on the micro scale of credit card and Interac™ transactions. Our communications depend upon the Internet and wireless networks, and our public institutions depend upon similarly constructed systems. These sorts of interconnected systems have demonstrated their fragility regularly as everyday data burps, more occasionally but alarmingly as major system failures. For millenarianism, goto “killing for reality,” page 109. For economics, goto “the hopeful science,” page 46.
LIFE INSIDE THE TECHNOLOGICAL SYSTEM One does not have to go looking for crises to see the fragility inherent in the technological system, though it is important to think about such extreme examples to see the system stretched to its limits, since the essence of a be-
Thinking Technology to its Ends
3
ing is defined in relation to its nonbeing. In this sense we experience knowledge of a being when we apprehend the danger of its passing and recognize both its limits and ours. We notice technology for example when it doesn’t work. This is when we start asking questions concerning technology, such as: <What happens if the interrelated system of apparatuses used to control nature falters? What happens when beings—human or nonhuman—react against their integration?> We cannot know the future—postapocalyptic nightmares will not shine a light on our somnambulistic culture—but we can reflect on the present and remember the past, looking for the limits of technology. Consider my day yesterday for example. I went to the library to sign out a book—Sun Tzu’s Art of War, a perennial classic on the importance of stealth, spies, and the sheathed sword (all prudent lessons for the helmsmen of that awesome technological empire, the United States of America). Though the book was apparently on the shelf, I could not access it because the library’s computer system was down. With the technology not functioning, it was as if the library were not there: without a way of conceptually organizing the books—of seeing them all in one view—the contents of the library became effectively just a pile of papers, and the institution stopped working (except perhaps for those nomadic readers who wander through the stacks). The content of the library consists of the books, but the medium is the on-line catalogue, linked to the Internet; and though books have a physical existence and are relatively stable (if protected from the natural elements of fire and water) the being of the Internet is electric. As a medium, unlike a book it is not sustained by the existence of self-subsistent medium, like cellulose for paper, which holds together because of its inherent properties. The Internet exists rather as a system of symbolic exchanges between its material nodes—terminals and terminal operators— with the being of the system as such constituted by active communications. If these electronic connections are overloaded through excessive traffic, a denial of service hack, a tree branch fallen on a wire, a lightning bolt, etc., then the system simply stops functioning. The hardware may be available to interface with the system, but unless there is a flow of information the computer screens stare blankly. What was real just a moment ago, as a library is a real ordered whole, suddenly vanishes—from presence to absence in the blink of an electronic eye. It goes without saying that there was no card catalogue to back up the computerized system. So when I asked the Librarian what to do, she suggested that I have a coffee and wait. There is a Starbucks™ in the Carleton University Library now, and to accommodate the corporate presence food and drink have been allowed into the stacks. Now corporations are often sold as more efficient than public institutions like libraries, but they are no less susceptible to the fragility of technology. When I mentioned to the Starbucks™ clerk that the computer system in the library was down, she replied
4
Section 1
that “Yes, the system’s been slow all day.” “Slower than slow,” I said, “the system is down.” “No,” she said, looking at her terminal screen, “it’s moving, just slow.” She was referring to the Interac™ network, not the online catalogue that I had on my mind. But then systems tend toward integration with other systems via technological development, and toward an overarching sense of the system; indeed, the purpose of technological development can be conceived as an unfolding of relational potentials toward integration for the sake of efficiency of exchange. The System as such is thus not conceivable as an end—as in a given form or design along the lines of a Platonic idea guiding history—but rather as an ongoing process of unfolding, actualizing and de-actualizing potentials formed by increasingly complex linkages: some hardened into institutional structures; others undoing the same; others sprouting up in cracks in the concrete. In this sense both the Interac™ and Internet systems follow pathways in the same electronic forest, functionally distinguished through the use of different interfaces: PIN-pads and self-check scanners. At a middle ground level the two systems are distinguishable as networks, one the property of a corporation, the other at least nominally public. On that particular day the University’s network wasn’t up, but the corporation’s was, so while I couldn’t find the book I wanted, someone could still sell me coffee—held over the edge of an abyss with a double espresso. Not to complain about my day, but I encountered further problems with technology in the photocopying room. Machines ate paper, stopped working in the middle of jobs, and ran out of paper. However, by comparison with the other malfunctions these mechanical impediments were reassuringly isolated and almost charmingly tactile. If one machine was jammed or ran out of paper or ink, I could simply move on to the next machine. And when it became apparent that all of the photocopiers were out of order, I could wait and watch the workman with his satchel full of tools open up a machine, put its parts back into proper order, and begin to start things up again. Electronic technologies, however, lack this stable, tactile, singular object presence of machine technologies. Electronic technologies constitute an interconnected system that is more than a sum of its mechanical parts. Machines do in a limited sense constitute a system also in that machines make other machines and so belong to the systems of production to which they contribute, but the interval between the construction and the obsolescence of a machine—its working life—is much longer than the electric pulse of digital data. As economists after Marx have made clear, the instruments of capital depreciate, the machine rusts and grows useless, though the system of exchanges within which it functioned keeps operating—the limiting factor being not so much the possible malfunction of the machines themselves, but rather those systematic crises that are products of proscribed functions.
Thinking Technology to its Ends
5
Working within the lockstep logic of mechanical production, Marx and other dialectical economists projected toward certain immanent contradictions arising within capitalism as a result of increasing efficiencies: the tendency from open competition toward monopolistic practices; the drive to free surplus investment capital for overseas opportunities through imperial ventures; accumulating inventories and the domestic under consumption of manufactured products.2 Clearly, some of these imagined projections were more sage than others, where in some instances ethical humanist ideals were substituted for a strict analysis of capitalism’s dual potentials for progressive integration and discordant development. Judged within the framework of dialectical economics, prophets of the immanent demise of capitalism as a system went wrong when they projected beyond present ethical crises toward a necessary resolution of those contradictions, in an instance of ethical outcry as prognostique. For many of those same contradictions that they projected into the future are compressed within present global systems of exchange, though on a nonhistorical timescale of just-intime production (to relieve the risk of large inventories on wait), planned obsolescence and the manufacture of desires (to reverse underconsumption), and global divisions of labor (to ghettoize and isolate revolutionary potentials). Now it is as if those potential energies, previously stretched out over and defining historical ages, are discharged and dispersed in episodic, electric explosions, some as quick as a flickering of the lights. The working machine stands ready as an input-terminal into a system of production and exchange, and as such is more a tool than technology. While it is true that machines embody certain systemic structures in their homogeneity—traces of the assembly line and process-marks left by the tools that made them—they have an artifact existence also, like wrenches on a workbench. And while collectors may preserve old wrenches, tractors, and hammers as artifacts, few preservers of memorabilia want to save old computers.3 With electronic technologies one is dealing with a true system, in which the flow of information and non-material communications constitutes the real being of the system, whereas the hardware—the computer terminals—act rather as interfaces into the system as such. As the inventor of the World Wide Web protocol for information exchanges over the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee, describes, . . . a piece of information is really defined only by what it’s related to, and how it’s related, . . . There really is little else to meaning.4
The essence of information, the animating substrate of digital technologies, is constituted by its flow rather than the bits of information themselves, which are reducible to the ultimate abstraction—the nonnumber zero, an empty set—and to the bare minimum indication of some kind of undifferentiated
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presence in the number one. The being of the technological system as such is thus to be found not in the content but in how the content is interrelated and how these relations and communications are structured. The specific kinds of structural differences that intervene between mechanical and electrical technologies became apparent through my experience with the photocopiers, where my real trouble with the copying-machines started not when the machines themselves broke, jammed, or ran out of paper, but when my payment card was refused, that is when the system of electronic information exchanges didn’t function. And just as I couldn’t find my book with a backup card catalogue, I couldn’t use “real” money to pay, since Carleton University has its own proprietary method of payment—an Interac™—like Carleton Card™— and none of the photocopiers at the University take coins. My Carleton Card™ had an error in its magnetic strip, so I had to go off to another office—and another node in that hierarchically structured institution—to solve this new technical problem. This was the fourth Carleton Card™ that I had been issued, as there had been problems with my file in the University’s new Banner system, the centralized electronic database used to store and access information about students and faculty. Here is the University’s description of the new, integrated system’s concept and supposed benefits: The new administrative computing system Carleton University is installing is a radical change from the earlier CP-6 mainframe environment where users tended to create their own separate databases, based on their needs. These databases did not “talk” or share information with one another. In most cases, this meant duplication of effort and greater chance of errors. That was the past. The Banner system is the future. Under the new Banner system there will be only one database. Data will rest in a relational database. How users relate to the data will be through modules grouped together under associated systems. These modules and systems are the heart of the Banner concept.5
Technohype turns to totalitarian fiat as relatively autonomous networks are dismissed as inefficient and steamrolled in a social-Darwinian push toward integrated organization. This integration may make the system function more efficiently, when the system does function. But it also creates dependencies on centralized organization—a recurrent weakness in social formations—while increasing aggregate demand that then tends toward peak periods of high usage, which can cause slowdowns or even shutdowns of the system as a whole. When this happens, all modules and all terminals are involved, not just those users within relatively autonomous networks. Then everyone’s “relation to data,” to borrow that notso-charming phrase, is compromised.
Thinking Technology to its Ends
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So we wait.6 I can’t sign out the book; we can’t go to work or buy groceries; we have to boil the water and light candles. Perhaps this is only a brief pause, a moment in the electronic dark before the lights come back on. But even if the governing faith in the technological system does manage to hold, we should take these moments in the dark to think about our interdependencies within technology, about the slender electronic threads that weave our lives together, taking into consideration their limits and ours. For For For For
impermanence, goto “history is an act that went walking,“ page 43. machine technology, goto “the state as mechanical man,” page 105. the limits of self-knowledge, goto “configurations of reality,” page 85. system, goto “system logic,” page 13.
LIKE WATER TO FISH We are surrounded by technology, yet for that very fact it is difficult for us to see and know technology. Technology conditions our modes of thinking and our possibilities for action, and at the most basic level frames our way of being in the world, and so it is hard to express a reflective understanding of technology as such beyond empty expressions of either self-satisfaction or anxiety: i.e., we are self-satisfied when we feel that technology is working for us, and anxious when we are out of joint with its operations and their often unintended byproducts. There is this existential difficulty in defining technology, in that both its ubiquity and obvious benefits make a clear and deep understanding of the phenomenon difficult. We can understand our microwaves and laptops as technologies, if by ‘understand’ we mean ‘effectively use,’ yet we have trouble answering what technology is, in and of itself. This is not even considered an important question, however important we take technology to be in our daily lives and in the shape of our shared world. Technology makes an impression on our thinking nonetheless, whether the full range of these effects are consciously realized or not. Our working definitions of technology allow us to think along with technology, accommodating ourselves to it, like the computer programmer who bends her thoughts to the workings of a machine, willingly taking on its sense and logic. This is not necessarily an oppressive relationship, but it is one in which it is hard to tell where the human being stops and technology begins. We can hold technology in our minds, but precisely for this holding close to technology our functional platitudes fall short of understanding. Still, our working definitions of technology that we use to get by in daily life do
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contain traces of the subject—technology—like scar tissue on our thoughts that must be interpreted as forensic evidence to see what we have done to ourselves.7 For automutilation, goto “savage machines,” page 82.
PLATITUDE #1: It is common to think of technology as a value-neutral set of tools. So for example, whereas abortion facilitated by modern techniques must be considered hideous in the hands of Nazis it may look less horrific when practiced by sympathetic doctors today. The anaesthetizing effect of technology—the numbing of the nerves of life—consists in the detachment of the consideration of ends—that is our consideration of the highest common purposes—from an understanding of means. Since the means, or what we actually do to accomplish our ends and which practically constitute our daily lives and public actions, are separated from our thinking about ends, technology comes to be seen as something neutral, a system composed of autoregulating automatons that perform their functions like the numbed limbs of a disembodied intellect. The account of technology as a neutral tool is platitudinous in that neither Nazis nor advocates of abortion see a need for either an apology or a defence. Both see what are, in their views, self-apparent goods: the elimination of Jews, homosexuals and communists, and the freedom of a woman over her body.8 More fundamental than the stream of ad hoc moralistic babble that flows over these stones is the stronger current into which it flows. What is important within the technological system, outside of the discussion of ends, good or bad, is that the process continues to flow. Technological development is self-referential and self-augmenting in this sense. The processes of development and the introduction of new systems of technical means erode the metaphysical grounds of judgments pertaining to the ends of action simply by transforming the consideration of what is good and bad for human beings to do into possible choices within an array of technically feasible options. Technology makes virtually all ends possible as future technical potentials. When the last men that inhabit the technological order of unlimited options go shopping for values, the consideration of ends becomes a matter of taste, so long as one’s tastes fall within the liberal sense of style, and so long as one keeps shopping. The availability of different values as technical possibilities or as articles of consumption, and more fundamentally, the idea that values are goods constructed by human beings for human consumption, radically alters the status of the moral purposes that would direct technology and put it to
Thinking Technology to its Ends
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good use. Under such conditions the purposes themselves do not function as principles in tension with presently available means, since the values that should direct technology are themselves products of the machinery that makes their realization as ends possible. Values are human-made goods. They are what we value: the value-added to the contingent stuff of human and nonhuman nature, that is, what we wish upon the world and for ourselves. And of course, values are plural. Technology neutralizes the discourse of values simply by making those humanly created goods technically possible as alternatives. On what basis then should we choose our shoulds? Only the free act inspired by a free thought projecting out from the cycles of production and consumption of goods can postulate a Good beyond the goods that are gone when they are drunk, eaten, thrown away as trash, recycled or reinvented. The neutral field of open-ended potentials that is liberated by technology opens up our conception of values to this possibility, driving toward the revaluation of values, to steal a phrase from the thinker who first told us what values are: goods that we make for ourselves.9 For revaluation, goto “the habit of transcendence” or “interstice,” page 89.
INTERSTICE “‘We have invented happiness,’ say the last men, and they blink.” Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, §5
The opening for interpretation in the last man’s declaration of selfsatisfaction—atrophied by an absence of desire yet preserved by the language forms that hold apart past from present from future—is in the verb tense. For if taken strictly in the immediate present tense the technical content of the statement is correct, that is if one takes truth as correspondence between a claim and technical capability; indeed, in this basic sense happiness is invented daily, baked like bread, and today’s marketplace is crowded with clones of Nietzsche’s last men looking to consume some truths. This is after all and for functional purposes how truth is taken normally, as a verum factum, i.e., But accuracy of representation, or put differently, the actualized correspondence between ideal and real, or wish and fulfillment, is not an adequate expression of truth. What then is missing in the last man’s statement of self-satisfaction, even if that statement is technically speaking correct? If there is room for interpretation in the self-referential core of liberal economic, political, and cultural logics, it is in the interstice of the past tense. That punctuating second of remembrance, even in the very blink separating the past from the eternal present of momentary consciousness
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contains within it the potential for a free relationship with technology— opening up a possible perspective beyond the immediacy of present satisfactions within technology and its by-products. Without that freedom for remembrance and reflection, taken up by the fleeting passage of technological novelties that stave off boredom and tickle the restless spirit, technology drives toward the creation of new purposes and desires that would give shape to new technical possibilities, each new value made more compelling in its universal appeal, demanding in its global application, and violent in the counterreactions that it provokes than the last. The closure of the question of the best political and economic order works to depoliticize global politics through imperial means, in effect resituating social conflicts from the global commons to global ghettos, while recasting wars as policing and revolutions as market corrections. For what is there left for a civilization to think or do, what action is not determined and so rendered inactive—that is reactive—when humankind believes it has invented both the effective ends and means of happiness, that the contradictions of human, historical existence are solvable through some kind of liberal democratic, world order engineered to please the global masses? On what terrain will the revaluation of values then occur? The progeny of political man answers: Here the possibility of the relocation of war under conditions of globalization acts as another anesthetizing inducement to the continuation of ongoing global war. Though Hegel may have been correct in pointing out that history is necessarily drawn toward the end of the universal recognition of human beings as essentially free and equal beings, he could not have predicted the kinds of vigorous reactions and energies of overcoming that his end of history thesis would provoke, Nietzsche’s first and foremost, though certainly not last.
